Tumble

Tumble
[Harry/Ginny; PG; 1340 words]
Spoilers: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Author's Note: for the Changing Seasons exchange, written for basilm. Many thank yous to reallycorking, who is my rock.
Summary: There isn't time to dream, to pretend, so she busies herself with plotting and planning and doesn’t think about caresses by the lake or how green his eyes really were.

::

She falls out of love as the leaves fall.

It’s not a dramatic thing, just a slow and steady process until she wakes up one morning to a lighter heart and bare tree branches.

She takes a walk that morning, out by the Forbidden Forest and once around the lake, waiting to see if it’ll all come flooding back—that blind, sweeping swoop in the pit of her stomach that thinking of Harry usually brings about.

Her stomach, however, stays put and she gets distracted by the crunch and crackle of leaves that get caught under her trainers.

For the first time since she was eleven and discovered that there were still heroes in the world, she feels like she doesn’t need one.

Neville notices at breakfast and his questioning look is hidden behind a slice of toast.

She ducks her head, trying to find words to explain why she doesn’t need Harry Potter to survive; why the idea of him is no longer something she desperately needs to be strong. Once, she would have blushed and stuttered about what Harry meant to her and now—now she knows he is a hero, but not her hero. Not her hero because she’s come to realize she needs to save herself.

Around her is the quiet mumble of hundreds of students all watched and baited and hunted every day in every corridor of the castle, and she knows that she’ll make it through this without anyone storming in to save her. Because she has to. Because she can.

“We need to do something about the current—” she pauses, dragging her fork through her eggs. “—about the current situation here at Hogwarts.”

He nods, eyes jumping over her shoulder to the Ravenclaw table. “Do you think Luna—?”

“I’m sure she will.” She smiles at him and he hurriedly goes back to tearing up his toast.

“What about—” Here, his eyes drop to his plate. “What about the D.A.? We could start it up again; I’m sure none of the members are fans much of what’s going on here. And Harry wouldn’t—well. Like you said, we need to do something.”

She chews her lip for a moment as she thinks about it, aware of Neville’s subtle stare as he waits for her response. Finally she nods.

Neville doesn’t mention anything more about Harry or her newfound independence and she finishes her bacon as they make plans for their own war.

::

Amidst tumbling snow and a fearful rebellion, she finds herself.

There isn't time to dream, to pretend, so she busies herself with plotting and planning and doesn’t think about caresses by the lake or how green his eyes really were.

She focuses instead on simply surviving; on completing detentions and avoiding detection and staying away from the Carrows. She plans attacks and organizes retaliations, practices nonverbal hexes and her shielding spell, nearly destroys a seventh year Slytherin in a fist fight before she is dragged off him and assigned a fortnight of detentions by Snape.

The D.A. meets whenever they can; their agendas coded into class notes, messages signed over dinner, nods in the hallway. Suspicion falls heaviest on Neville, the most vocal, and he accepts it with a shrug of his shy shoulders.

“It’s better me than you, or Luna,” he explains one day in the Common Room, after he’d returned from detention with a new mess of injuries. His blush is hidden behind bruises and scrapes and Ginny shakes her head as she rolls her wand between her fingers, itching to heal him.

“That’s not true; you shouldn’t have to take the brunt of it. We’re all in this together, you remember,” she argues, lips pressed tight.

Neville shakes his head and leans back in his chair. “I'm not going to let you get hurt.” He silences her attempt to interrupt with a hand. "I promised to look after you."

Immediately, she imagines Harry, all dark looks and hard voice, threatening Neville if he let anything happen to her. The image is frighteningly easy to conjure and she wishes suddenly she knew where Harry was, just so she could hex him silly.

"I don't need looking after--" she starts, feeling like her skin is too tight.

"I know, Ginny. But we need you."

“You’re the one who thought up using the D.A. in the first place; without that, we’d be just another bunch of whispering discontents.”

Neville watches her for a long moment through swollen eyes and then suddenly smiles, the emotion marred by the split lip, the puffy cheek. “Ginny, you really are amazing, whether you’ll believe it or not.”

There’s nothing to be inferred from what he says, no deeper meaning, no promises. He says it as if it’s complete and total truth, and she realizes slowly that he sees her as simply Ginny—not as Harry’s ex-girlfriend, or Ron’s sister, or one of Dumbledore’s favored few—but as just Ginny.

And she likes it; she likes the feeling of being Ginny.

::

As the world begins to blossom, she realizes she misses Harry.

What she misses isn’t the way he would stare off into the distance, lost in war and battle and blood; nor his heroics, his need to save everyone, his guilt, his selfishness.

There is still a war going on, but now there is sunshine to bolster them, as more and more students disappear into the Room of Requirement. Everyone is tense and tired and missing those who have been taken away.

Ginny knows she won’t be at Hogwarts for much longer; she can feel the charge in the air, feel the change, the shift. Everyone knows that something’s about to break, and the hallways are filled with hunched shoulders and wary voices.

Any chance she gets, she spends outside, breathless at the hints the world isn’t dead. She longs to fly, she aches to fly, and she tries to imagine what it would be like to take off and never look back. She tries to picture what the world might be like if—when—the war ends; who she might lose, how she’ll go on—

And she misses Harry. She misses his hands, how wide they were, how they felt against her skin. She misses his smile, how it would slide so slowly over his features. She misses hearing him talk, how he would bicker with Ron, how he would placate Hermione, how he forgot himself when excited or angry or glad. She misses his laugh.

But what she misses most of all is talking to him, getting to know him. They’d once spent three hours arguing about whether it was better to be an only child or the final member of a gaggle; it had ended when Ron stormed downstairs to demand Harry go to bed.

Quietly, when there is no one but her and the ominous groan of the Whomping Willow, she promises that if she gets the chance, she’ll get to know Harry for as long as it takes.

She pretends not to notice that she doesn’t promise she won’t fall in love with him.

::

Summer is one long celebration.

Ginny stands in the middle of it all at the Burrow as the sun skims high in the sky, watching her mother, her father, her brothers, her friends—

Things are far from perfect, but they’re getting closer. There is no longer the need to keep her voice down, to duck her head, to roll her shoulders forward.

She itches to do all the things she couldn’t in the last few years; fly, dance, laugh, live.

And then there’s Harry.

Across the garden, she can see him and Ron and Hermione clustered into a tight knot, the picture perfectly asymmetrical as Ron takes Hermione’s hand. Before she can look away, Harry’s caught her eye and started towards her, eyes certain, mouth set.

She can’t stop herself from smiling.

This is it.